Day 1 in the books

I wanted to share some thoughts about the school day. Going in I was a little stressed and felt not 100% prepared. Like, I needed my 1st period prep to get things ready. Today I was going to bring home the student info forms to read through, but then I forgot them. That’s ok I guess, need something to do in my prep tomorrow.

What did I do?

 

Had assigned seats and a bellringer. Some of them did not sit in the assigned seats. I noted this but did not make a big deal of it. For better or worse. (The books say it’s important to win this power struggle straight off!) I had the bio slide displayed and talked a little about myself, and my co-teacher talked about her info in my CTT classes. I showed the slide with the quote: “Half the curriculum walks in the classroom with the students, in the textbook of their lives.” (EJ Style) I never knew the second clause of that quote until I tried to look it up. I talked about how it was an important quote that I wanted to take seriously. And that I planned to make space in the class for their ideas and interests, that it’s not all about getting through all the skills and lessons and chapters and units.

Then I shared a slide stating “Three Non-Stupid Rules.” I explained that after my last year at the school, I was focused on rules like “don’t throw things” or “no vaping in class.” But these are kinda stupid rules -- students know them, and putting them on a list doesn’t have a magical power to make them happen with less frequency. My three non-stupid rules were:

1. Use common sense -- with a corollary of “Don’t do things you know are wrong.” Should we yell and scream at each? Use curse words? (Funny story: with a student coming in and almost immediately releasing some such words at a classmate, she said she was speaking in cursive.) And of course cell phones. Given that we’re twenty minutes into the first class of the year, is this a good time to be checking your insta?
2. Don’t sell yourself short -- I related how I’ve seen students who seemed bursting with intelligence who just kinda phoned it in when it came to do the math task. I also related how the class is meant to draw about the intelligence that each student brings to the class, just as it will hopefully serve as something to help that intelligence grow.
3. Kind an open mind -- both to new ways of doing math, and also to ways of being, whether it’s someones preferred style of music, their cultural background, their religion, their fashion, the people they’re romantically attracted to, etc. That being around a diverse group of people is something that helps you grow as a person.

Ok a couple of more notes because this is getting long and I wanna post. I did a short group activity, just challenging them to find something that they all have in common. And we did a group share out. A simple routine that I wanted to get underway.

What’s next? In tomorrow’s class I want to do a favorite math task: How many ways can you arrange the letters in your name? (Or, how many words can you spell with your name? Understanding that word means any sequence of letters in this context.) In a couple of sections I didn’t get to the syllabus, so that’s on the agenda as well. What’s the focus of the day? Learning names and working together seems like the obvious answer!

Hello World!!!!

Just wanna get this first post on the blog without overthinking it really. I'm at Jackalope Coffee, a favorite work spot. It's summer vacation still (for two more glorious weeks); I've got a second coffee going and yes a real desire to get this blog underway.

 Why a blog?

I've been teaching for like seventeen or eighteen years at this point. I do have definite opinions and things that I think are right and wrong. I'll talk about those at some point. But---sometimes distressingly---I feel like I'm sincerely just figuring things out for the first time. Thus spawned the name of this blog.

I just finished reading Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of Freedom. As I understand it was his last book. I have not read his other work except probably some chapters from Pedagogy of the Oppressed in grad school... or now I remember also being assigned to read a chapter before starting the tutoring job at Daley College. I'm not sure they understood the text they assigned...

Anyway I've found reading this text to be extremely generative. To me I'm not always sure what that word means (generating things I guess) but here I mean that it gives me ideas that I want to implement in my classroom, or that feel like a truth I need to incorporate into my being. Let me pick a quote from the last chapter or so...

Teaching, which is really inseparable from learning, is of its very nature a joyful experience. It is also false to consider seriousness and joy to be contradictory, as if joy were the enemy of methodological rigor. On the contrary, the more methodologically rigorous I become in my questionings and in my teaching practice, the more joyful and hopeful I become as well. [Pedagogy of Freedom, page 125]

At this very moment the chorus from SAULT's "Wildfires" comes on, as if to echo and reify Freire's sentiments. I see this also echoed in Gholdy Mohamed's work (Joy as a discipline), in Cornelius Minor's work (We Got This) which I always tried to read but didn't quite see clearly until this summer. The other stuff I'm reading this summer are Woodson's Miseducation of the Negro, a book of essays by Alfie Kohn (Feel-Bad Education), and probably something else that I can't remember at the moment. Non-education books of the moment: Karl Knaussgard's Summer, a history of Malort, and a book of poetry called We Contain Landscapes by an author first name Patricjia (I've probably butchered the spelling). I bought the poetry book at the bookstore in O'Hare, surprisingly well-stocked, I think called Barbara's. Maybe I'll go back to this paragraph and verify this info, but anyway I'm trying to get this blogpost out there without distracting myself with the internet at large.

All this reading was inspired by probably a few things. The immediate spark came from the experience of going to the Math in the Mountains teaching camp in June. It was like a math teacher vacation, just solving cool problems at all hours, interspersed with little hikes, visits to Jackson, and some great conversation as well. Most of the other attendees worked at independent schools (why not say private schools?), some of these schools obviously supporting the type of attitude that mathematics is a creative discipline. That curiosity is important to the learning of mathematics. And I came away first of all refreshed and re-inspired to do something like this with my students. And then I got kinda mad thinking about all the supposedly well-meaning adults who impose a type of mathematics that is nothing like this. That's based around skills, either filling cavernous gaps or training quick children in even more technical skills. Like, how much time did I waste talking about students' dismal ACT scores? How did that talk help me become a better teacher? So I realized that I had (always had) the power to reject, to refuse the premise of the question, in the service of my students. This feeling combined with reading the book of essays by Kohn (a felicitous find at the thrift store in downtown Jackson), leading to bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress (omitted from the list above!), and that led into the the Freire and everything else.

Some things I want to write about:

• Ideas to implement class meetings, to discuss what students want to learn, how the class is going on a regular basis, to improve the classroom community, and to lead to more democratic structures within the classroom
• How to stop giving tests (should I stop giving tests?)
• How to change the idea that grades are the "payment" that students receive for doing work in class
• Specific math teaching topics, like the teaching of geometry in general, and what is algebra for, and other good stuff

Also I'm realizing that I do have this side of me that is, I guess I can call it, an amateur mathematician. There are three different investigations that I spent time on this summer, and I'd like to write up my results. Preview:

1. Spencer's problem: An ant is on the corner of a 2x2x2 cube. It has grid lines drawn in, I imagine like a small rubix cube. The ant can only travel along those grid lines. There are many possible "shortest paths" from one corner to the opposite corner, only traveling on the outside surface of the cube. How many?
2. Jessica's problem: It started with this puzzle [I've got to come back and add the image!] and then I investigated a generalization to the puzzle.
3. My own problem: I was looking up how to construct a pentagon, and then I started looking at golden ratio arithmetic, and powers of phi. For example, phi^2+phi^{-2}. I wonder if blogger supports any type of math input.

Surely that's long enough for the first post, so.... Hello!